Axel Garcia tricks during the IWWF U21 waterski championships at Predator Bay waterski club in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Axel Garcia: The King of the Half Jack

Axel Garcia tricks during the IWWF U21 waterski championships (image: @bearwitnesssportsphotos)

August 17, 2025

When the conversation turns to innovation in modern trick skiing, it almost always starts with Joel Poland. The multitalented Brit has made “super flips” part of the sport’s everyday vocabulary, turning his signature super-mobe-five into a tournament staple.

But there’s another name worth saying—one rising fast.

Seventeen-year-old Axel Garcia of France has been quietly building a résumé that demands attention. Third at last year’s Under-17 Worlds behind Mati Gonzalez and Jake Abelson. Multiple-time European champion. Top seed into the finals at the recently concluded Under-21 World Championships.

And above all, he’s developed a reputation for one thing: launching himself into frontflips with the kind of style and ease that makes fellow skiers double-take.

Among elite trick skiers, Garcia has been dubbed by some as the “King of the Half Jack.” The half jack—named after American skier Kevin Jack—is a frontflip variation where the skier edges into the wake from an inverted back position before throwing the flip. It’s a close cousin to the wakeboard “tantrum” and has quietly become one of the most common moves in top-level runs. These days, a mobe–reverse–half jack combo is almost as standard as a side slide.

Some, like world record holder Jake Abelson, still favor the more orthodox BFF (frontflip from a regular back position), but that’s becoming rare. The half jack’s speed, consistency, and smooth transition make it the go-to choice.

Garcia hasn’t just mastered it—he’s reinvented it. In 2023, he submitted a clip of himself landing a reverse FFLF, which the IWWF approved as a brand-new trick.

Recently, he posted an Instagram video that made waves: both regular and reverse FFLFs, plus both regular and reverse FFLBBs (frontflip 360s), all starting from the inverted back like a half jack. The reverse FFLBB isn’t even in the rulebook yet—but if Garcia submits it, he could add another flip to the official trick list.

Top names took notice. Pato Font, Mati Gonzalez, and Neilly Ross all jumped into the comments with praise.

Garcia’s skillset is a case study in a long-running debate: whether the IWWF’s trick scoring table needs an overhaul.

Take backflips. Progressing from a basic backflip (BFL) to a backflip 540 (BFL5F) is worth 350 more points—about a 70% increase. But frontflips? A basic FFL is worth 800 points. The 540-degree version (FFL5F) gets just 150 more—less than a 20% bump.

Why? Because of an arbitrary 1,000-point ceiling. Years ago, the double backflip was set at that max value, despite no skier ever landing it. Since then, every trick has had to fit between 500 and that cap, squeezing the spread for higher-difficulty frontflips into a narrow range.

The result: Garcia gains little by throwing his most jaw-dropping tricks. At the Under-21 Worlds, he topped the prelim leaderboard with a run of safe, fast mobes, half-twists, and just two frontflips. Why risk a reverse half jack or a front-full for an extra 100–150 points when a 750-point half-twist is cleaner and safer?

He’s not alone. Abelson regularly posts outrageous frontflips online—no-wake FFLBs, front-fulls from a regular wrap—that never see a start dock in competition. Pato Font has ski-line and spin variations that would make even Cory Pickos jealous. Every top trick skier has an ace or two they leave at home on tournament day.

Part of the reason is difficulty: in trick skiing, you can’t afford an early fall. Speed and consistency win. That’s not a flaw—it’s part of what makes the sport thrilling. But with a different point spread, more of those “party tricks” could become prime-time tricks.

Axel Garcia is exactly the kind of skier trick skiing’s future needs—innovative, fearless, and stylish. His flips are already redefining what’s possible off a ski wake, even if the scorebook hasn’t caught up.

For now, his wildest moves might remain for Instagram. But if the sport wants its brightest stars to keep pushing the limits, it needs to make sure the risk is worth the reward.

Because Garcia may not just be the King of the Half Jack—he might be next in line for the whole trick skiing crown.

Get ready to watch Wakeboard, Wakesurf, and Cable Wakeboard, all taking place in Chengdu, China, from August 7–17, 2025.

Water Skiing Just Lost the World Games. Maybe We Deserved It.

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Water skiing just lost the World Games. Maybe we deserved it.

Wakeboard, Wakesurf, and Cable Wakeboard, all took place in Chengdu, China, from August 7–17, 2025 (image: IWWF)

By Jack Burden

August 14, 2025

The knives are out for the IWWF. They always are. This time, it’s over water skiing’s absence from the 2025 World Games in Chengdu. Forty-plus years of tradition gone, replaced by wakesurfing’s debut. Another bureaucratic misstep? Another case of bad leadership? That’s the easy take — and the one our sport seems most eager to reach for.

You’ve heard the grumbling: How could they let this happen? Don’t they know water skiing was one of the Games’ founding sports? We take it personally because it feels personal — a door slammed in our face after decades of loyal attendance. And yes, the decision was made in consultation with the IWWF. And yes, the optics are ugly. But let’s not pretend this was a bolt from the blue.

The World Games is a product, not a sentimental reunion. It exists to fill stadiums, sell tickets, and justify broadcast time. In that context, swapping three-event skiing for wakesurfing isn’t madness — it’s arithmetic. Wakesurfing needs less infrastructure. It plays better in urban venues. It comes with a soundtrack and an image package you can sell on TikTok. And China, our host, has a ready-made roster of wake athletes but exactly zero active three-event skiers. The organizers didn’t choose wakesurfing to spite us. They chose it because it fits their event better than we do.

Here’s the harder question: why wouldn’t we fit?

For years, our competitive structure has been almost aggressively insular. Our tournaments are for us. Our coverage is by us. Our audience is… well, mostly us. Many in the sport barely flinched when the news broke. The World Games? Please. It’s an outcasts’ Olympics, they say — full of fringe and gimmicky sports nobody watches unless they stumble across them on TV.

But that’s exactly the point. The World Games gave us legitimacy in the wider sporting world. In more than a few countries, national federations used our place in the Games to justify government funding. And when was the last time water skiing got real terrestrial TV coverage? For those still pining for the ESPN Hot Summer Nights era, this was as close as we’d come in decades. Now it’s gone.

Wakesports have embraced spectacle and accessibility; we’ve clung to purity and tradition as if they were a form of currency the real world still accepts. They aren’t. Not to the World Games, and not to any outside partner who needs more than nostalgia to justify a slot.

So, yes, the IWWF could have fought harder. Maybe they should have. But what exactly were they supposed to fight with? A product that hasn’t been meaningfully reimagined in decades? A fan base that barely exists outside our own families and training partners? A sport whose public face is often a locked gate to a private lake? That’s not leverage. That’s a liability.

And now we’re talking about the Olympics. “We are actively bidding for inclusion in Brisbane in 2032… we might have an actual chance to get in there,” IWWF President Jose Antonio Perez Priego said recently. Encouraging words — but when your most recent headline is We just lost the World Games, it’s hardly the kind of momentum you want for an Olympic pitch.

The truth is we weren’t pushed out — we drifted out. Slowly. By choice. By choosing to play only to ourselves. By defining “success” as keeping the same people happy instead of adding new ones. By treating the outside world as a distraction rather than an opportunity.

If losing the World Games feels like a punch to the gut, it should. But don’t waste your energy swinging at the IWWF. This isn’t a one-off scheduling decision. It’s a preview of our future if we keep doing exactly what we’ve been doing.

Because if we want to stop losing places — at the World Games, in media coverage, in the public imagination — we’re going to have to start competing off the water as fiercely as we do on it. Otherwise, this won’t be the last goodbye. It’ll just be the latest.

How Much Is a Trick Worth?

Articles

How much is a trick worth?

As the World Championships near, trick skiing faces a quiet reckoning

Trick skiers, like world record holder Erika Lang, have redefined what was though possible in the sport (image: @erikalang36)

By Jack Burden

August 3, 2025

As the World Championships approach, a quiet but consequential debate is coming to a head: how much is a trick really worth?

At stake is the very structure of trick skiing’s scoring system—a rigid points table that hasn’t fundamentally changed in more than two decades. For athletes like world record holder Joel Poland, that’s no longer acceptable.

“The point values for high-difficulty flips are crippling trick skiing,” Poland told the IWWF Water Ski Council. “It’s limiting what athletes can do.”

Poland should know. Two of his most innovative tricks—the 900-point “UFO” and the 950-point “Matrix”—were recently approved for competition but, in his own words, are “tricks you’ll never see in a tournament” unless something changes. He’s not alone in that sentiment.

A Broken Balance

Trick skiing is unique among board sports: every maneuver has a fixed value, from 40-point surface turns to 950-point flips. The goal is objective scoring. The result? Homogeny.

“Right now the trick point values reward doing more tricks versus doing harder tricks,” said Brooks Wilson on the GrabMatters podcast. “You can get more tricks in because you’re going fast. It’s a speed game.”

That tradeoff—efficiency over difficulty—has shaped elite competition. Instead of variety, most skiers now converge on the same sequence of reliable, high-value tricks.

“We want to see variation,” added Freddie Winter. “Instead, everyone’s forced to do the same kind of runs.”

The Repetition Problem

An analysis of over 100 score sheets at the 2023 World Championships shows just how narrow the tricking landscape has become.

Among hand tricks, backflips dominate. The half twist (BFLB), worth 750 points, appeared in every finalist’s run—typically paired with its reverse. In contrast, the only other trick worth 750, the ski-line seven back, was attempted just once.

The mobe (BFLBB), worth 800 points, was nearly as common, performed by three-quarters of the finalists—far outpacing other tricks in its point range. The basic backflip remains a staple, especially among intermediate-level skiers, tricks worth comparable points, such as W7B, SLBB, and SL5s, were attempted much less often and with much lower success.

Toe tricks show a similar pattern. Toe back-to-backs (TBB) are ubiquitous, appearing in 112 of 117 toe runs (the exceptions were early falls). Toe wake back-to-backs were also incredibly common; the regular and its reverse featured in every single finalist’s toe run. Toe wake tricks worth comparable points, such as TWO or TWLB, were less common, although some of this stems from them not having an easy reverse.

Misaligned Incentives

Not all frequently performed tricks are necessarily overvalued—some, like backflips, may be common because they serve as foundational building blocks for higher-scoring flips. And in toe runs, the inherent physical limitations naturally result in a narrower pool of viable tricks and sequences.

But some mismatches are hard to ignore. Why does the toe wake back-to-back (TWBB) score more than the toe wake 360 (TWO), despite similar difficulty? Why is the mobe front-to-front, attempted only three times at the tournament, valued the same as the standard mobe, which was performed over 100 times?

Take the half cab (BFLF) as another example. Worth 550 points, it was performed just once for every three half twists (BFLB), valued at 750. While it may be true that landing in the back is more difficult than taking off in the back, does that justify a 200-point gap? If so, why are half twists so common—and half cabs so rare?

Innovation Without Reward

In early 2024, the IWWF approved four new flips, including Clarens Lavau’s “Super Half Twist” and Poland’s “UFO.” But even with official approval, no one expects them to appear in major tournaments.

Poland’s “Matrix”—a frontflip with a ski-line 540 from the back position—was awarded 950 points. That’s just 150 more than a basic frontflip, and identical in value to the established super-mobe-five.

“There’s a point where you go, well, the slam it takes to learn this trick is just not going to be worth the extra 50 points,” said Poland. “I was trying to do a super-mobe-seven—a backflip 720 over the rope—but there’s not much point because they’ve made it very clear no trick can be worth more than 1,000 points.”

The scoring ceiling isn’t just discouraging; it’s actively stifling innovation.

“I tried three of them,” Poland added, “and they were the worst crashes of my life. I was like, ‘I’m never gonna try that again.’”

Without a meaningful scoring incentive, tricks like the Matrix may never make it into competition. Even Poland, one of the sport’s most creative skiers, is reconsidering the cost.

“You’re limiting creativity and progression,” said Winter. “Do we want to see the same runs forever—just a bit faster?”

A System Stuck in Neutral

The IWWF knows the problem exists. In a memo last year, Council Chair Candido Moz urged the Tricks Working Group to bring forward point values that better reflect “true difficulty levels.”

But attempts at reform have stalled for years.

“The skiers could never agree on point values,” Moz has explained. “So IWWF never received a proposal.”

That may change this September. A restructured Tricks Working Group, which includes Poland as a member, is expected to present formal recommendations during the World Championships in Recetto.

Time for a Reset?

Poland is done waiting. “In my opinion, [the current system] is crippling trick and limiting the athletes,” he said. He plans to stay vocal in the lead-up to Recetto.

Winter sees trick skiing as the discipline with the most untapped potential. “Right now, it’s just not reaching it,” he said. “But it could.”

The current system rewards repetition and safety. A modernized score table—one that truly values difficulty and risk—could transform the sport overnight.

“You’ve got to blow it up to build it up,” said Wilson.

The World Championships run August 27–31 in Recetto, Italy. A formal review of trick point proposals is expected to take place at the IWWF Water Ski Council meeting during the event.

A House Divided: Nautique Splits from the Pro Tour

Articles

A house divided: Nautique splits from the Waterski Pro Tour

Image: Nautique Boats

By Jack Burden

July 6, 2025

On a flawless summer morning, with water so flat it blurs the line between lake and sky, some of the world’s best slalom skiers wait their turn. They stretch, limber up, and ready themselves to launch down a course they know as intimately as their own signatures. The cameras roll. The engine’s roar cuts clean through the still air. From a distance, professional water skiing appears unshaken.

But beneath the polish, the sport stands once again on uncertain footing.

Fractured tours, softening prize purses, splintered sponsorships—and a question as old as the slalom course itself: who, exactly, is steering water skiing’s future?

This winter, as tournament schedules for another pro season locked into place, Nautique—the boat manufacturer as synonymous with waterskiing as Wilson is with tennis—quietly severed its final ties with the Waterski Pro Tour for 2025. On paper, it was a footnote. In practice, it was an earthquake.

This is the equivalent of Wimbledon quietly pulling out of the ATP Tour. Or if Augusta told the PGA: We’re good on our own this year, thanks.

Since its inception in 2021, the Pro Tour has been professional skiing’s most unifying force. Born out of pandemic-era recalibration, it bundled previously disconnected events into a coherent narrative, raising prize purses and driving a resurgence of fan interest. It created a season-long arc, elevating once-forgotten stops into destination tournaments. And for a few glorious seasons, the fractured sport of competitive skiing looked, briefly, like a professional tour again.

Nautique’s quiet exit cracks that illusion.

The writing, truthfully, has been on the wall for some time. Nautique is the primary sponsor of water skiing’s two longest-running and highest-paying events—the Moomba Masters and the U.S. Masters—both widely regarded as the sport’s equivalent of Majors. Nautique also serves as the primary organizer of the latter tournament. After its inclusion in the Pro Tour’s inaugural season in 2021, Nautique pulled the Masters out of the Tour. Then, when Moomba returned post-COVID in 2022, they too declined to participate.

A third blow came when the Botaski ProAm, a newer but increasingly important event, stepped away in 2023 after a single season of Pro Tour involvement. Another Nautique-sponsored event, Botaski’s withdrawal reinforced a trend.

Now in 2025, after four seasons as a fixture on the Pro Tour, the California ProAm will join the ranks of the two majors and Botaski on the sidelines. And just like that, the longest-running event on the Pro Tour is relegated to a sideshow—no longer relevant to any season-long narrative, unless one considers qualifying for the U.S. Masters to be the be-all and end-all of the water ski season.

Their reasoning? Officially muted. Representatives from Nautique Boats declined requests for an interview for this article.

It’s difficult—even when granting Nautique every benefit of the doubt—to formulate a coherent rationale for their aversion to the Pro Tour. Let’s be clear: it costs nothing for an event to be included on the Waterski Pro Tour. The perks are numerous—pre- and post-event marketing, social media exposure, highlight packages, and, most importantly, inclusion in an absorbing season-long narrative that gives any result the potential for broader ramifications.

Sure, there’s a reasonable argument for the majors to stay independent. They have the history, they have the brand. Arguably, the Masters’ decision to remain separate from the fledgling Coors Light Water Ski Tour in the 1980s saved it from the fate of other legacy tournaments like the California International Cup and the Tournament of Champions—both subsumed into the Tour brand and ultimately victims of the organization’s financial woes.

But the Waterski Pro Tour is just that: a brand name. It doesn’t take over existing tournaments. It supports them. It adds value. It’s hard to see how a tournament like the Botaski ProAm—begun as a small, men’s-only slalom event in 2018 and since expanded to include women and, more recently, tricks—has a brand strong enough to stand entirely apart. Surely the season-long narrative and visibility the Pro Tour brings is a value-add, not a liability.

The closest thing to a justification is a vision, hinted at publicly by Nautique insider Matt Rini during last year’s California ProAm: the idea of a Nautique-backed international circuit.

“Nautique is all about three-event—building a three-event boat,” he said. “The goal is to have four [tournaments], each featuring all three events, in a season. There’s no jump at Botaski, but they want to add it there. And they want tricks here [in California]. That would be amazing.”

That vision has been echoed before by Brian Sullivan, Nautique’s VP of Marketing, who once described the company’s ambition as “wanting to keep doing bigger and better events, to keep growing the sport—that’s one of our main goals.”

But even that ambition raises questions—chief among them, whether a parallel circuit run by a single manufacturer can truly grow the sport, or simply divide it further.

Nautique’s recent maneuvers, however, haven’t occurred in a vacuum. Taken alongside a string of recent controversies, they appear less like isolated strategic pivots and more like part of a broader pattern: control, consolidation, and increasingly contentious relations with athletes.

In recent years, the company has faced criticism for its rigid gatekeeping of the Masters — from Byzantine qualification procedures to the banning of a world champion for alleged unsportsmanlike conduct — as well as the contentious dismissals of top athletes like Jonathan Travers, Jacinta Carroll, and Patricio Font, raising concerns about its approach to athlete management.

Seen in that light, Nautique’s retreat from the Pro Tour looks less like a routine reshuffle and more like a tightening grip on the sport’s levers of power.

If so, they are not the first to try.

Competing pro tours have been attempted before in water skiing. Rarely with much success. In 1987, the American Water Ski Association launched the short-lived U.S. Grand Prix of Water Skiing to compete with the Coors Light Water Ski Tour. Then again, more dramatically, in 1990, Camille Duvall and a cadre of frustrated skiers attempted a coup. They launched an upstart circuit promising more prize money, athlete control, and safer skiing conditions.

For one turbulent season, skiing had two competing tours: the rebel PAWS circuit and the establishment Michelob Dry Tour. Sherri Slone famously won two pro jump titles on the same day.

The experiment imploded. Both tours crumbled under legal battles, sponsor fatigue, and logistical overload. By 1991, PAWS was gone. The old tour limped along, wounded but intact. The sport never fully recovered its eighties-era swagger.

Today, no one has openly declared “war” like Duvall once did. But Nautique’s move—alongside an already splintered calendar featuring the WWS Overall Tour and standalone events—feels eerily like history tightening its rope again.

On paper, these should be boom times. Each of the past three seasons has brought the highest prize purses in over 15 years. The gender pay gap has shrunk dramatically, from 60 cents on the dollar to near parity. The Waterski Broadcasting Company streams nearly every pro event, in crisp HD, for free. Fans can sit in their living rooms and watch the world’s best almost every weekend.

But peel back the webcast polish and cracks show.

The Swiss Pro Slalom—the sport’s most-watched webcast annually—has just been demoted from the Pro Tour after failing to secure adequate sponsorship. Jumping, once the marquee discipline of water skiing, has seen prize money slashed by more than half in the last decade. Even trick skiing, despite a recent resurgence on the water, still lags far behind its 2000s heyday in financial support.

For the first time since 2020, when the global pandemic shuttered nearly all events, professional prize purses are forecast to decline in 2025.

Even Nate Smith, the most dominant slalom skier of his generation, has quietly taken on a “real job” in recent years to stay afloat. Coaching gigs and benevolent parents remain as crucial as gate setups at 41 off.

It begs the question: can the sport really sustain another professional circuit? Can a niche sport like water skiing afford this level of fragmentation?

The cameras are still rolling. The rope still hangs off the pylon. The skiers will ski. And for now, the sport holds together—if just barely.

But history in this sport doesn’t repeat itself quietly. Every time water skiing has splintered before, it’s taken years to recover. Some fractures have never fully healed.

Now, both sides risk losing something vital.

Nautique’s events—the crown jewels of professional skiing—draw their power from prestige, history, and the feeling that they are the center of the sport’s universe. Walling them off too far from the broader narrative risks dulling their shine, turning majors into outliers.

At the same time, the Pro Tour loses critical legitimacy without the weight of the sport’s longest-standing events on its calendar. Fans, athletes, and sponsors are left navigating a fragmented landscape—unsure which path truly leads to the sport’s future.

The truth is, no one wins a fractured season.

Not Nautique. Not the Tour. Not the athletes. Not the fans.

If the sport is to move forward, it needs everyone—manufacturers, organizers, and athletes—rowing in the same direction again.

There’s still time to course-correct.

Hopefully, someone picks up the rope.

“It’s Just Skiing”: Carter Eaton’s Cross-Country Crusade to Change the Sport

YouTube Series Captures the Highs and Lows of Pro Water Skiing

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Carter Eaton’s It’s Just Skiing captures the highs and lows of professional water skiing

Image: @arthur_sayanoff

By Jack Burden

June 27, 2025

In a sport obsessed with buoys, boat settings, and breaking 41 off, Carter Eaton is chasing something else entirely.

He’s not a world champion. Not a 10.25m regular. Not backed by a major boat brand. But Eaton — an Alaskan-born skier with a DIY van and a camera in hand — is quietly becoming one of the most compelling characters in professional water skiing.

His YouTube series, It’s Just Skiing, now 17 episodes deep, documents an audacious, improbable mission: compete in every pro slalom tournament he qualifies for in 2025. From a distance, it looks like a feel-good side quest. Up close, it’s a test of endurance — mental, physical, emotional — offering a raw, unfiltered look at what it really takes to chase a professional dream in a sport that barely pays.

You see the breakdowns. The van repairs. The homesickness. The missed openers. The joy of running 39 for the first time in a record tournament. And yes, the self-doubt — the kind few athletes show publicly, let alone on camera.

“I’ve been on the road since April… I’m around the world alone… I wanted to go to Morocco so bad,” Eaton confesses in a recent video. “But you know what? Ski better. If you ski good enough, you get to go to every tournament.”

That kind of honesty is rare in water skiing — a sport so tight-knit it often feels allergic to vulnerability. Eaton is the antidote.

His recent uploads span much of the European leg of the season — from Monaco to Dommartin — with pit stops at the Colosseum, some of Europe’s most scenic ski sites, and a few late-night monologues that wouldn’t feel out of place in a sports documentary. In one of the series’ most striking moments, after a rough tournament, Eaton delivers this:

“I’m going to fail and fail and fail, but I’m going to succeed. The skiing is only a little bit of that success… I want to show the world what this sport is. But nothing worthwhile has ever been easy.”

That mantra underpins the entire project. Eaton isn’t just skiing for himself. He’s trying to prove that water skiing — despite its barriers, niche audience, and lack of mainstream polish — can still be captivating. That it deserves to be seen. That it doesn’t have to be perfect to be powerful.

In a landscape where the spotlight mostly shines on winners, Eaton’s story resonates for a different reason: he’s doing what many wish they could. Not winning it all. Not turning a profit. But showing up anyway. Chasing the dream.

That may not make him a “pro” in the traditional sense. But in 2025, being a professional athlete is about more than just scores and sponsorships. It’s about connection. Storytelling. Having a voice.

Winning is only enough in a handful of sports — and water skiing isn’t one of them. Even top athletes in much larger sports often only scrape by, prize money split between travel expenses and training costs. The ones who truly thrive are the ones who build something more: a brand, a following, a reason for fans — and sponsors — to care.

It’s why names like Joel Poland, Neilly Ross, and Freddie Winter resonate far beyond their results. Yes, they’re elite competitors. But their influence doesn’t come solely from buoy counts. Poland and Ross have cultivated huge social media followings, turning short-form edits and behind-the-scenes clips into brand assets. Winter, meanwhile, is seemingly everywhere — from podcasts to TWBC interviews to mushroom-based elixir docuseries.

And then there’s the logical next step: creators like Marcus Brown and Rob Hazelwood, who’ve realized that content creation isn’t just a side hustle. It’s the job. They’re telling stories, shaping narratives, and showing fans what life in this sport actually looks like — beyond the scoreboard.

And then there’s Eaton. No entourage. No script. Just a skier with a dream, a camera, and something to prove — not just to the world, but to himself.

“There are other people that will change the sport forever with how good they are at skiing. That won’t be me,” he says. “But I’m going to change the sport forever.”

Maybe that’s hyperbole. Maybe not. Either way, the view count is rising. The story is unfolding. And we’re watching.

Because at its heart, this isn’t just about results. It’s about believing that the journey — rough, weird, unfinished — is worth sharing.

Win or lose. Succeed or fail. After all — it’s just skiing.

Brittany Greenwood Wharton jumps at the LA Night Jam

Why the LA Night Jam Left Us in the Dark — Literally and Digitally

Articles

Why the LA Night Jam left us in the dark — literally and digitally

Image: @lanightjam

By Jack Burden

June 15, 2025

Last weekend, some of the world’s best jumpers went soaring under the lights in Zachary, Louisiana. The LA Night Jam had it all: a packed shoreline, festival energy, world champions, rising stars, and Waterski Pro Tour points on the line.

But unless you were there in person, you didn’t see a second of it.

There was no webcast. No slo-mo replays. No expert commentary. No drone shots capturing heroic flight. Just the dry final results, posted to an anachronistic website after the spray had settled—black-and-white numbers standing in for what was, by all accounts, one of the most electric nights of the season.

And for diehard fans like me, that felt like a gut punch.

In the post-COVID era, we’ve grown used to watching every pro event live, for free, from anywhere in the world. The quality of these broadcasts has never been better, thanks in large part to The Waterski Broadcasting Company (TWBC). But cracks are starting to show in that model—and there’s a quiet, potentially growing shift away from relying on livestreams to carry the weight of an event.

Two of the four stops on the 2024 WWS Overall Tour were not broadcast, including the Canada Cup, which doubled as a Waterski Pro Tour jump stop and delivered some of the season’s most thrilling competition. The Fungliss ProAm, with the richest men’s slalom purse of the year, also eschewed a webcast.

Why? Because streaming costs money. And despite loyal viewership, the audience hasn’t really grown. TWBC’s YouTube views have plateaued since 2020. The downgrade of the Swiss Pro Slalom—still the most-watched water ski webcast every year—drives the point home: if the sport’s most visible livestream can’t generate enough sponsor revenue to stay on tour, something’s broken.

Still, many—including me—believe high-quality webcasts are a worthwhile investment. Maybe the audience isn’t there yet. But what better vehicle exists to grow the sport long-term? Who else is grinding to tell skiing’s story with the polish and persistence of TWBC?

That doesn’t mean, though, that every tournament needs to look the same.

The LA Night Jam reminds us there’s another way—one rooted in the past, but maybe just as vital to the future.

Rather than catering to a global digital audience, LA Night Jam pours its resources into the on-site experience. It’s a deliberate throwback—a water ski festival, as event coordinator Tucker Johnson described it in a local TV interview: “It’s fun for the whole family… a pro tournament set up with tons of events around it as well.”

There are trick exhibitions. Slalom head-to-heads. Freestyle skiers. Adorable kids on combos. In one memorable stunt, someone even barefooted out of a hot air balloon. It’s all designed to dazzle the crowd—many of whom arrive knowing nothing about water skiing and leave wanting more.

The funding model reflects that philosophy. Instead of relying on industry sponsors trying to reach a global audience, the event is backed by local businesses. Their website, perhaps vindictively, notes that the “event is not sponsored by MasterCraft Boat Co.”—a nod to the departure of their former headline sponsor and the pivot toward a community-first approach. It’s a stark contrast to the traditional, industry-funded model.

Here, the crowd isn’t just a backdrop. It’s the point.

And LA Night Jam isn’t alone. The 2024 WWS Canada Cup followed a similar formula: local crowd, local sponsors, no webcast. We’ve also praised the King of Darkness for its festival-like atmosphere and crowd engagement—though that event still pairs its in-person spectacle with a top-shelf livestream.

These formats don’t just recycle the same core audience—they expand it. They draw in new families, new eyeballs, and potentially new sponsors. Yes, physical crowds come with constraints—parking, logistics, capacity. But they offer something livestreams haven’t cracked yet: the ability to convert the curious into the committed.

As reigning world champion Freddie Winter put it recently on the TWBC podcast: “We shouldn’t just be skiing in backyard tournaments… getting in front of people is also fantastic.”

Back when waterskiing was booming, it had both—crowds and broadcasts. Passion and reach.

So maybe it’s not about choosing one or the other. Maybe it’s about trying everything, everywhere, all at once. Because if there’s one thing the sport can’t afford right now, it’s to put all its eggs in one basket.

It’s become cliché to quote the line about insanity being doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. But it’s worth reflecting on. TWBC has poured heart and soul into their livestreams. And while their numbers are respectable, they haven’t meaningfully grown in five years. Meanwhile, their side projects like The Unknown Sport of Waterskiing and The Rise of Waterskiing arguably have the greatest potential of breaking through to new audiences.

At the same time, LA Night Jam and others like it are bringing fresh energy, new money, and new eyeballs into the sport—and paying athletes in the process.

With only five pro jump events on the 2025 calendar, every one counts. The fact that LA Night Jam delivered a full purse without a webcast isn’t a failure—it’s a sign of creativity and resilience.

So maybe the real takeaway is this: not everything in waterskiing needs to be built for people like me. Sometimes the best thing we can do for the sport is reach someone who’s never seen it before. Ideally, yes, we’d have both—a packed shoreline and a global livestream. But if resources are limited, I’m glad events are experimenting.

Throw enough at the wall, and something might just stick.

The future of water skiing won’t come from clinging to one tournament model. It will come from daring to try new ways to bring the sport to life.

If that means leaving some fans in the dark—so be it. But if it means lighting up a new generation, then the gamble is worth it.

Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly implied that the Lake 38 ProAm had shifted away from TWBC for budget reasons. In fact, TWBC was the organizers’ first choice, but was unavailable due to scheduling conflicts.

Masters Waterski & Wakeboard Tournament qualification criteria continues to raise eyebrows

Masters Invites Finalized: So Why Are There Empty Spots?

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Masters invites finalized: So why are there empty spots?

Image: pinemountain.org

By Jack Burden

May 14, 2025

The second Masters Qualifier wrapped last weekend at Championship Ski Lake in Auburndale, Florida, sending a baker’s dozen of the sport’s top athletes to Callaway Gardens later this month. Yet despite the roster of world-class names advancing, quiet concerns about the qualification system continue to simmer.

Dane Mechler, Freddie Winter, Allie Nicholson, Alexandra Garcia, and Neilly Ross secured berths in slalom; Dorien Llewellyn, Adam Pickos, Kennedy Hansen, and Aliaksandra Danishueskaya punched their tickets in tricks; while Emile Ritter, Igor Morozov, Aaliyah Yoong Hanifah, and Valentina Gonzalez qualified in jump.

All elite skiers, all deserving. And yet, in four of the six events contested, the cut line was barely there.

In men’s tricks and women’s jump, every entrant advanced. In women’s slalom and men’s jump, all but one skier qualified. In some disciplines, simply paying the entry fee and showing up was enough to earn a Masters spot.

It’s an awkward look for a tournament that bills itself as “the most prestigious event of the year.” And it’s not a one-off—it reflects a recurring pattern within the current qualification system.

While Masters organizers have long prioritized a high standard of excellence, their bespoke and exacting qualification pathway has, perhaps unintentionally, increased the likelihood of unusually small fields and unclaimed invites—even in disciplines with deep talent pools.

By contrast, virtually every other professional tournament—including the growing slate of Waterski Pro Tour stops—leans on established systems like the Waterski Pro Tour standings, the IWWF performance-based ranking lists, or some combination of the two to shape fields. The Masters’ decision to chart its own course has left rosters thinner than the sport’s current depth suggests.

Nowhere is this more visible than in men’s tricks. Once considered a sleepy corner of tournament skiing, men’s tricks is now arguably the sport’s hottest discipline, thanks to a recent flurry of world record activity, rising prize purses, and a wave of emerging talent. Yet despite that momentum, the Masters field remains thin.

Stringent entry criteria for the qualifiers required male trickers to have averaged over 11,000 points in world ranking competition over the past 12 months—a benchmark met by only 12 skiers worldwide. Of those, four are still juniors; one, the defending champion Martin Labra, is injured; another, Danylo Filchenko, has rarely left Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion; and one more, Martin Kolman, did not attend. The result: only seven eligible and willing competitors across two qualifiers, and at least one invite expected to go unclaimed.

For comparison, the recently concluded Swiss Pro Tricks tournament drew 16 male entrants—more than double the presumed Masters field—despite offering less than a third of the prize money. The appetite among athletes is clear; the bottleneck lies in the qualification process.

The Masters’ tightly gated system seems increasingly out of step with the sport’s evolving landscape. While trick skiing pushes forward—with new pro events in Morocco, Monaco, and Portugal, rising stars breaking records, and social media drawing fresh audiences—the Masters remains constrained by criteria that no longer fully reflect that growth.

The Masters still carries immense cachet. It boasts water skiing’s richest prize purse and an iconic venue that has crowned champions since 1959. But prestige, hard-earned, can be fragile. Keeping pace with the sport’s expanding depth will be key to preserving that legacy.

Masters Revises Qualification Criteria—A Step Forward, for Some

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Masters revises qualification criteria—A step forward, for some

2025 Masters Water Ski Criteria (image: Masters)

By Jack Burden

May 2, 2025

There’s been movement in the boardrooms of Correct Craft.

After growing discontent—and at least one shouted critique—the Masters Water Ski & Wakeboard Tournament has announced revised qualification criteria for 2025. It’s not a wholesale reform, but it is a tangible step forward.

The headline tweak? Repeat champions will no longer monopolize invitation slots. If a skier sweeps multiple qualifying events—as Ryan Dodd did in 2023 by winning all four Nautique-sanctioned tournaments—their dominance won’t cost someone else a chance. Now, when an athlete wins more than one qualifying event, the additional invitations cascade down to the next-best finishers. That’s how Will Asher, Matias Gonzalez, and Lauren Morgan—standouts over the last 12 months—have secured their tickets to Callaway Gardens without relying on a frantic last-minute qualifier.

It’s a simple adjustment—but in a system accused of favoring geography over merit, it’s a meaningful one.

And it’s already having an impact. Heading into this weekend’s first Masters Qualifier, half the spots in most professional disciplines are already spoken for. That’s a stark contrast to 2024, when as many as seven of eight invitations in some events were decided during two mid-May weekends in Central Florida. The shift gives deserving pros more breathing room—and a clearer path to one of the sport’s most prestigious stages.

But the momentum stops short.

The new rules do not extend to the Junior Masters, where qualification criteria remain virtually unchanged. The repeat champion clause? Still absent. Junior skiers must continue to rely heavily on results from these two amateur events—both held in Central Florida.

It’s a system that may reward proximity over potential. While professional athletes often live and train year-round in the Sunshine State, juniors typically don’t have that luxury—nor the freedom to miss multiple weeks of school in pursuit of a qualification score.

The result? A field that increasingly resembles a Florida state championship with a glossy title.

Imagine telling a 15-year-old phenom from Chile or France that their shot at one of the sport’s biggest youth stages depends not just on talent, but on whether their parents can bankroll a multi-week Florida tour during exam season. That’s not a qualification system—it’s a filter for privilege.

There are viable solutions. For juniors, allocating some of the invitations based on the amateur performance ranking list seems a logical fit for an amateur event. As we’ve discussed in the past, the Waterski Pro Tour standings could help shape qualification for professionals as well.

Let’s be clear: Nautique and the Masters deserve credit. The 2025 update is an overdue acknowledgment that the pandemic-era system was flawed—and that the sport’s top talent deserves better. The new rules are already producing fairer outcomes.

But they also send a second message: the old system wasn’t working.

So why stop halfway?

The Masters has always been more than just a tournament. It’s a gathering of champions, steeped in history—a flagship for the sport. But if it hopes to maintain that status in a globalized, post-pandemic era, the path to Robin Lake must be one the entire world can realistically reach.

Stream It and They Will Come?

Articles

Stream it and they will come?

Image: @waterski_nation

By Jack Burden

April 27, 2025

The 2025 Swiss Pro Slalom will not feature on the Waterski Pro Tour after the event failed to meet the minimum prize purse threshold required for tour inclusion. A blip? A bureaucratic technicality? Or is it a mirror held up to the broader struggles of professional waterskiing?

The numbers are clear cut: a total prize purse of $12,000—half of last year’s offering—falls below the threshold required to maintain its star-level status. Technically, it could qualify as an introductory event, but only if it hadn’t worn the badge of a higher-tier competition in both 2023 and 2024. So here we are, with a top-tier webcast and world-class athletes, but an event that no longer qualifies for the official tour it helped define.

And therein lies the tension.

In many ways, the Swiss Pro Slalom is the blueprint for modern waterski events. Held in the heart of Central Florida—a stone’s throw for most of the world’s elite—it minimizes travel costs and sidesteps the logistical sprawl of international hosting. There’s no scramble to pack bleachers with spectators. Instead, the focus is squarely on the screen, with a heavy investment in producing a polished, professional webcast. In fact, the Swiss Pro has served as the unofficial proving ground for The Waterski Broadcasting Company (TWBC), the undisputed titan of waterski streaming. It’s their backyard. It’s their home court. And it shows.

But for all its polish, the money has rarely matched the production quality. Since its 2015 inception, the Swiss Pro Slalom has usually operated on the financial fringes. Its status has bobbed between introductory and non-qualifying levels, only recently ascending to a more lucrative tier in 2023 and 2024—before falling back again this year.

Yet despite modest prize purses, Swiss Pro Slalom remains TWBC’s most viewed webcast every year. It routinely eclipses richer, flashier tournaments with deeper sponsor pockets. Which begs the obvious question: does prize money matter as much as we think it does?

If viewership is the metric that counts, then maybe not. But if professional waterskiing becomes a loop of Central Florida-based events rewarding only the top three athletes, the ceiling lowers fast. There’s a real danger the sport becomes a closed circuit: elite, expensive to enter, and hard to sustain.

Current event funding models lean heavily on a trio of lifelines—endemic sponsors, community benefactors, and increasingly, athlete entry fees. That’s a brittle structure. One good gust and it all falls apart. And yet, the answer may not be to pour more into the prize pot, but to grow the audience instead.

Which is precisely what TWBC is trying to do.

Armed with high-tech cameras, drones, slick graphics, and expert commentators, TWBC has become the face of waterski broadcasting. In 2024 alone, it streamed 10 of the 13 Waterski Pro Tour events. Its influence is unmissable. Since COVID-era lockdowns drove viewership online, TWBC’s numbers have surged—at least initially. But since 2020, YouTube viewership has plateaued. Publicly available data shows a consistency in viewer counts, not growth. Maybe the deeper analytics tell a different story, but the surface stats suggest a ceiling has been hit.

Still, the ambition hasn’t waned. TWBC’s 2023 documentary project drew over 140,000 views, taking a page from Formula One’s “Drive to Survive” playbook. But the follow-up series, The Rise of Waterskiing, hasn’t yet caught fire. The sport is still waiting for its breakout moment.

Meanwhile, nearly every major player in the sport is all-in on TWBC. And for fans, this might just be the golden age. You can watch almost every event live, for free, and in better quality than ever before. But current viewership alone doesn’t pay the bills—or the prize checks. If it did, the Swiss Pro Slalom wouldn’t be fighting for tour status.

So here we are. The Swiss Pro Slalom won’t appear on the Waterski Pro Tour in 2025. But it’ll still feature a stacked field of athletes. It’ll still be produced with unmatched polish. And if history is any guide, it’ll still be the most watched event of the year. For all its flaws, it remains one of the best exhibitions of pro slalom skiing.

Will that be enough?

I’ll be watching. Odds are, if you’ve read this far, you will too. And maybe that’s the metric that matters most.

After all, if a rope is shortened at the lake and no one sees it, did it really happen?

Robert Pigozzi slaloms at the Nautique Masters

What Happened to Robert Pigozzi? The Rise and Fall of a Slalom Prodigy

Articles

What happened to Robert Pigozzi? The rise and fall of a slalom prodigy

The famous ‘Pigozzi lean’ (image: Des Burke-Kennedy)

By Jack Burden

March 30, 2025

Cast your mind back to 2019, pre-pandemic, when the waterski world still felt a little simpler. Ski boats were still under six figures, webcasts were homemade affairs, and Joel Poland’s bid for world domination was in its infancy. If you had to pick the next big thing in slalom back then, there was only one correct answer: Robert Pigozzi.

At 21 years old, with arms like tree trunks and a gold chain around his neck, Pigozzi could have been mistaken for a swashbuckling young baseball star – the national pastime of his native Dominican Republic. Instead, he channeled his strength into ripping tow pylons out of their sockets. His leans put even Freddie Winter to shame.

In 2015, he won the Under-17 World Championships, setting a record that would stand for almost a decade. That same year, as a 17-year-old, he finished runner-up at the Under-21 Worlds. By the age of 20, he’d already won his first professional tournament and became just the 12th member of the 41-off club (though many keyboard warriors would question the legitimacy of scores from that event). In 2019, he earned seven top-five finishes in professional events, including an incredible European tour run where he claimed a second pro title alongside three runner-up finishes. He capped off his breakout season with gold at the Pan American Games.

He finished that season fourth in the Elite Standings, making him one of only two skiers (alongside Stephen Neveu) to break into the top four past the unbeatable quartet of Smith, Winter, Asher, and Degasperi over the last five years of the Elite Rankings.

Yes, it helped that Nate Smith was sidelined for much of 2019 due to his SafeSport investigation and subsequent suspension, but Pigozzi’s skiing was the real deal. In 2019, he scored three or more at 10.25 meters (41’ off) eight times in professional competition, including on the notoriously challenging Yarra River.

Fast forward to 2024, and Pigozzi has changed. He’s matured. He’s married. He’s running multiple side hustles, balancing his entrepreneurial ventures with the demands of being a professional athlete. Perhaps the shift in priorities has affected his performance. Last year, he entered just four pro events, finishing 22nd, 15th, 12th, and 17th. He managed to run 10.75 meters (39.5’ off) only once.

At the season’s final event, he looked like a fish out of water. On his opening pass at 13 meters (32’ off), Pigozzi inexplicably pulled up narrow for two ball. Given a reprieve by the best-of-two-rounds format, he looked shaky throughout his second round, repeating the same mistake into six ball on his third pass at 11.25 meters (38’ off).

Even reigning world champion Freddie Winter couldn’t make sense of it: “I am honestly floored. I’ve seen a lot of stuff in waterskiing, but I would’ve put my house on him getting around six. He was cruising, but then suddenly, he’s pulling on the inside and narrow.”

Pigozzi’s form has been on a downward trend for a while now. He hasn’t had a top-five finish since 2021 and has made just two finals in the past two years. In the last five seasons, he’s recorded fewer scores of three or more at 10.25 meters (41’ off) in pro competition than he did in 2019 alone.

Perhaps there’s no way back from this slump for Pigozzi, once the shining star of world slalom skiing. He turns 28 this year, tied the knot, and the responsibilities of adulthood are catching up with him.

But at his best, no one slalomed quite like the strapping Dominican. When running late, he’d drop the hammer, with leans so deep he seemed parallel with the water. A boat driver’s worst nightmare (it’s perhaps not surprising his father is one of the most highly regarded in the world), he was the skier who made you think, “That’s how it should be done. If only I were stronger, braver, younger.”

Where Nate Smith and his many imitators make shortline skiing look effortless, Pigozzi at his best made it look like something anyone could do—if they were just a little more daring. His style harkened back to the power of slalom greats like Kjellander and LaPoint—raw strength combined with dogged determination. It’s the kind of firepower and excitement the sport often lacks today.

So let’s hope there are more chapters to be written in Pigozzi’s story. He remains one of water skiing’s finest sluggers.

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